Partial Solar Eclipse this Sunday!

solar eclipse, photo by tobibritsch

mLive reports that there will be an annular (partial) solar eclipse tomorrow evening. David L. DeBruyn, curator emeritus of the Roger B. Chaffee Planetarium in Grand Rapids says that Michigan will be too far out of the eclipse’s “path of angularity” to see it entirely but that:

The good news, to lift your spirits after dashing them: Starting around 8:22 p.m., Michigan be able to catch about 40 minutes of a partial eclipse as the sun dips below the northwestern horizon and the moon just begins creeping across the sun’s disk, according to DeBruyn.

As if that weren’t already kind of cool enough, DeBruyn said the Sun and moons’ positions at sunset will distort their shapes and make for oval-shaped, grotesque-looking orbs. ”You will find that … a little over one-third of the sun’s disk will be hidden by the moon, and that both the sun and the moon’s disk will be distorted because of the atmospheric refraction just as the sun is setting,” DeBruyn said. “It’s a bending and distorting of the sun’s rays as they pass through the atmosphere of the Earth.”

Check this out on black and in her sunrise, sunset slideshow.

More eclipse fun on Michigan in Pictures.

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